For Gaining Wisdom and Instruction
Learning to Appreciate the Proverbs
I recently have been preaching through the book of Proverbs at my church.1 It has been one of the most challenging sermon series that I have ever tackled.
The proverbs are short, poetic sayings that teach a truth. Often that truth is difficult to grasp. These aren’t bite sized nuggets of truth that are easy to understand. They’re deep. In Hebrews 5, in the New Testament, the author of Hebrews talks about how some of the Bible’s teaching is like milk. It’s good for baby Christians, but eventually we need to grow up and start eating more solid food, we need deeper teaching. There’s the milk of the word and the meat of the word. I have heard the Proverbs described as the hard candy of the word. You can’t just swallow it like milk. And if you try to chew on it like meat you’ll break your teeth. You have to sit and suck on it if you want to benefit from it.
I have to admit to you that I don’t think I have ever made it through a hard candy without crunching it at some point. It takes too long, I get impatient. And if I’m honest, I have the same struggle with this book of the Bible. I have never sat with Proverbs in the way that we are supposed to and let these proverbs soak into me. I have always found the book frustrating and confusing and I haven’t been patient enough to slow down and savour the hard candy of God’s Word.
The first nine chapters of Proverbs are a preamble that get us ready for the collection of proverbs that begins in chapter ten and makes up the main body of the book. The preamble starts by telling us the author and purpose of the proverbs, the way they will guide us on our journey.
1 The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel:
2 for gaining wisdom and instruction;
for understanding words of insight;
3 for receiving instruction in prudent behavior,
doing what is right and just and fair;2
What is the purpose of the proverbs? How do they guide us? By helping us to gain wisdom and instruction. Proverbs is here to teach us how to be wise, how to be someone who understands insight. But notice that when Proverbs says that it is going to teach us wisdom, it doesn’t just mean that it will make us smart. Verse 3 tells us the proverbs are “for receiving instruction in prudent behavior, doing what is right and just and fair.” Wisdom isn’t just about what we know, it’s about our behaviour, how we live. Living prudently, wisely- “doing what is right and just and fair.” This is why Proverbs is such a difficult book. Wisdom—virtuous living—is not something that we can learn just by reading a self-help book, it’s a long and slow process.
This process is circular. If life is a journey, then wisdom is the way we navigate this journey well, but we also learn wisdom along the journey through our experiences and mistakes. And then we can use what we have learned to navigate well. And here’s the next disadvantage I have with this book: I am terrible with directions, even if I have travelled the same road before. When I was younger and still living with my parents—this is before everyone had Google maps on their phones—my dad would try to give me directions to some place I was going to go. And he would always start by trying to relate it to some experience I had in the past. We would have a conversation that went something like this:
“Do you remember when we went to that restaurant down town for that birthday party?”
“Umm… yes, I think so.”
“Do you remember on the way there, there’s that intersection with the car dealership that has the inflatable men outside? Well instead of turning left there, you go straight and turn right at two stops later…”
And I would be lost lost. My brain doesn’t work that way. I cannot follow instructions like that because I’m just not observant. I didn’t see the car dealership, I don’t know where it is. I wasn’t paying attention, so I can’t learn from it.
Life is like that. Things happen around us all the time. People make decisions. We make decisions. People get sick. People change their minds. People are mistreated or mistreat others. People lie or tell the truth. People work hard or are lazy. And there are consequences for all of these things. And if we’re paying attention, we notice these things and can ponder them. Do they mean something? And then, as we read Proverbs, we see how it speaks into these situations. And we start to recognize the truth in what it is saying about life and we grow in wisdom.
But, again, it’s not easy. Like life, the proverbs are not organized by category. You don’t gain all of your experience in a certain area at once. It happens bit by bit over many many years. And things you learn often have unexpected applications in completely different areas of life. Sometimes the experiences build on one another, sometimes they seem to contradict each other, and the more you experience, if you pay attention and think about it, the more you learn. Proverbs does the same thing. There isn’t a section of proverbs on patience, but there are dozens of proverbs that speak about patience scattered throughout the book. Often the proverbs about one topic are also in relation to something else. You can’t even just do a search on your computer of the word patience, because you’ll miss most of what is in there. You just have to dive in and soak for a while to absorb what’s there.
I love having Google maps on my phone. I don’t have to figure anything out, I just follow the instructions. But Google maps has made me dumber. I haven’t learned how to get places because I don’t have to think about it. I just follow the spoon-fed instructions. Proverbs is not a guide like that. It is not going to give us seven easy steps to grow in wisdom. It is going to slowly shape our minds and our hearts so that we learn to become wise and virtuous. And so you have to sit with Proverbs and suck on them and soak in it.
Preaching through Proverbs has forced me to do this for the first time ever. And as a result, I have started to see things in my life and in the lives of people around me that remind me of what I have been reading. Things are starting to connect, which is helpful for preaching, but even more importantly, it’s helpful for navigating life wisely.
NIV ® 2011